Photograph by Kholood Eid April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 39T
he other Issue that young women astronomers speak up
about is bias, the deep cultural belief that, for instance,
women are good at certain things, and science is not one
of them. Like sexual harassment, bias, both unconscious and
explicit, is widely acknowledged and is covered in every code of
conduct. Where it was once endemic and obvious, it now is slightly
less endemic and operates just below the visible level. Urry has
been on hiring and promotion committees for the past 30 years
and says she still sometimes sees a man presented as a genius
when he has not quite “done his genius thing yet,” whereas peo-
ple question whether a woman with comparable accomplishments
did the work on her own. Melodie Kao—Ph.D. 2017, a former Hub-
ble fellow and current Heising-Simons 51 Pegasi b fellow at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies the magnetic
fields of planets and low-mass stars—says she herself has had to
actively resist being harder on women’s proposals.
A partial solution, beginning in 2018, has been to implement
a system of “dual-anonymous” proposal review, that is, one in
which neither the reviewers nor the proposers know the other
group’s identities. The major funding agencies and observato-
ries now use dual-anonymity, and although the results are based
on a small sample, the success rates of women’s proposals seem
to have gone up, albeit not dramatically. “We’re moving from con-
scious, overt, unapologetic discrimination to unconscious bias,”
says Laura Kreidberg, Ph.D. 2016, who won the Annie Jump Can-
non Award and is the founding director of the department of
atmospheric physics of exoplanets at the Max Planck Institute
for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “For now it’s strong, but
I have a huge amount of hope of getting rid of it.”
Because bias and sexual harassment seem to have deep,
perennial roots, a few young women say that they initially
wanted to burn the whole system down. But then they thought
that rather than destroy a culture, they could make their own.
“We’ve come to know each other in enough numbers,” Daniel says,
“[that] we can start to make sure a woman is in every decision-
making room.”
Kreidberg is creating a wholly new department at her insti-
tution. She wants thinking to be more collaborative, “done at a
blackboard,” she says. “I want juniors to speak up and ask ques-
tions. And I want people to not have so many responsibilities
they can’t be creative—there’s no way around long hours at the
cost of other things, but I have a family, I’m a runner, I tango, and
without these breaks, I run out of ideas.” Berg leads a 50-person
team: “Everyone knows what’s going on; no cliques, and no cut-
ting people out.” Casey co-leads a group of more than 200 peo-
ple whose rules are, “Don’t worry about papers that disagree,
address it in a future paper, and don’t be a dick. Respect the
human, let the science happen, and it’ll work itself out.”
This young cohort of women astronomers is exquisitely aware
of earlier generations’ generosity and of its own responsibility to
future scientists. “We recognize the generations of women who
reached down and pulled us up, and a lot of us think now we need
to do the same,” Werk says. Urry estimates that she has spent
roughly a quarter to a third of her career changing the conditions
for women. “You have to stay in the field to change things,” Hörst
says. “If it had been intolerable for Meg [Urry], I wouldn’t be here.”
Most of these young women mentor undergraduate and grad-
uate students who are not necessarily their assigned advisees.
Kao teaches workshops that she markets as being on early-career
skills but that are also about vulnerability and emotions, “how
we know when we need to tend to our boundaries or to take bet-
ter care of other people.” Others run programs and workshops
on the entire constellation of bias issues. They offer classes for
children interested in science. They serve on their institutions’
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) committees, and they note
that the DEI work tends to be done mostly by women and minor-
ities. “I’m trying to think of a woman who is not an activist,”
Medeiros says. Their activism in the past 10 or so years has par-
ticularly focused on the demographic populations whose num-
bers in the field are still too low: “Things are better for us,” Knut-
son says, “but ‘us’ is still white”: white people make up 60.1 per-
cent of the U.S. population and 82 percent of astronomers.
Astronomy’s demographics are disturbing: 18.5 percent of Amer-
icans are Hispanic or Latino, but 5 percent of astronomers are;
13.4 percent of Americans are Black, but 2 percent of astrono-
mers are. A recent NAS report called the numbers of people of
color in astronomy “abysmally low.”
“I’m a first-generation woman of color who has to learn a com-
pletely new world,” says Melinda Soares-Furtado, Ph.D. 2020, a
Hubble fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who stud-
ies stars with odd chemical abundances. “I can code-switch, but
it’s exhausting.” Kao is first-generation Taiwanese-American:
“From day one I’ve struggled to belong in the space I’m in. Half the
time I want to change my name.” Lopez says, “I’m Mexican-Amer-
ican and have cerebral palsy, so that’s another set of hurdles.” She
once went to a meeting with maybe 40 people whose sexual ori-
entation and race or ethnicity were something other than straight
and white, and she was shocked at “how many of us had encoun-
tered the [assumption that] our advisers had done our work.”
The restrictions that people at these intersections deal with
resemble the barriers of Rubin’s world: being the only one like
you in the room means sometimes wondering whether you should
even be in that room, and it means the other people in the room
sometimes think you are incapable of doing what you have just
done. “I’m never the only woman there, but for sure I’m the only
Black woman,” Manning says. “Isolation is weird—some days it’s
‘Why don’t I go where I’m not being looked at like this,’ and some
days it’s ‘No, I need to be here so someone else can see me.’ ”
When I started talking to this bunch of young and sparkly
women, I thought they might describe themselves as just astron-
omers, not women astronomers. What they have done is more
interesting: they have reframed “astronomy” to necessarily
include “women”—they have merged “women” into “astronomy.”
For instance, those of them offered the Annie Jump Cannon
Award that Burbidge rejected have accepted it with pleasure and
not as a prize for people who would not otherwise win prizes.
The point, they say, is that they are women; they cannot escape
it, and they might as well go ahead and have green hair, wear
dresses to conferences and win women’s prizes. They have been
intelligent, creative and hardworking all along, but now they are
also conspicuous; they have made themselves, as Manning says,
seen. They are like Vera Rubin, slapping the lady-shaped icon on
the door and telling the rest of their world to get used to it.FROM OUR ARCHIVES
How to Fix Science. October 2018.
scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa